It was born in the break, all those decades ago — that moment when a song’s vocals dropped, instruments quieted down and the beat took the stage. It was then that hip-hop came into the world, taking the moment and reinventing it. Something new, coming out of something familiar.
At the hands of the DJs playing the albums, that break moment became something more: a composition in itself, repeated in an endless loop, back and forth between the turntables. The MCs got in on it, speaking their own clever rhymes and wordplay over it. So did the dancers, the b-boys and b-girls who hit the floor to breakdance. It took on its own visual style, with graffiti artists bringing it to the streets and subways of New York City.
It didn’t stay there, of course. A musical form, a culture, with reinvention as its very DNA would never, could never. Hip-hop spread, from the parties to the parks, through New York City’s boroughs and then the region, around the country and the world.
And at each step: change, adaptation, as new, different voices came in and made it their own, in sound, in lyric, in purpose, in style. Its foundations steeped in the Black communities where it first made itself known and
